Building the Future: Reflections on 2024 & Software Trends for 2025 TRANSCRIPTION

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT

“Building the Future:
Reflections on 2024 & Software Trends for 2025”

December 11, 2024

 

Featuring

Guest: Miles Oliveira, from Buildable

Host: Brett Wooden, from Buildable

 

Brett: Well, let's get started, so, you know, really excited to kind of kick this off as being our last webinar. We're going to look at just reflections of 2024 on the software side, a little bit of the hardware, and then we're going to just jump into the future, talk a little bit about what's on the horizon of 2025. We've got Miles on the call today from Buildable.

I'm Brett Wooden. I've been hosting a couple of these, so it's exciting to have Miles on and kind of ask him, put him in the hot seat, ask him some questions, right, and see his projections. And so, you know, kicking this off, Miles, well, first, Miles, why don't you introduce yourself? Can you say what you do? 

Miles: Yeah. I'm Miles Oliveira. I'm the sales director at Buildable. I've been with the company for eight years. So my job within Buildable is really to drive revenue growth and a lot of that goes through kind of helping projects along. So understanding what's the need, how do we, what's the best way to help kind of build out a product, and then kind of managing those relationships going forward.

So I am kind of part of the team that is on the front line of saying, hey, these are kind of new things that people are thinking about. I'm researching constantly to understand, hey, what's the best solution for our clients? And so I stay up to date on a lot of the new trends and kind of new technologies and solutions coming out from the industry at large, and kind of seeing, well, what does that mean for our clientele? What does that mean for, you know, our company as well? And what does that kind of mean for, you know, future use? So excited to talk about that today. 

Brett: That's great. That's great. Well, with that said, why don't, let's just dive right into it. What is the biggest, I would say, biggest advancement or thing launched in 2024 within software development and innovation side? 

Miles: Yeah, that's a great question, Brett. Brett, I would answer that question with a question. Are you familiar with artificial intelligence? 

Brett: Yeah, that's like, that's like the new, what was the Omnichannel, was kind of a big buzzword. You know, FinTech is a buzzword, you know, but artificial intelligence has definitely hit that hard this year.

 

“Are you familiar with artificial intelligence?”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Miles: Yeah, this is, 2024 was really the year that artificial intelligence, I think, really went fully mainstream. And here's what I mean by that. 2023 saw the kind of proliferation of open AIs, chat GPT.

That was really the kind of big story of 2023, was open AI releasing a new product to the public that had not been seen before. Essentially, it introduced the concept of you're able to interact with a database like a human being through a chat-based interface. That was a big innovation there.

What that is, it's basically a large language model, which has a huge database that is trained on all sorts of things. Basically, pretty much the entire Internet is indexed and used on that. And now you're able to ask questions of it.

So kind of similar to when Google kind of really came out pretty strong in the early 2000s of being able to have a search engine. This is the next iteration of that kind of process of, well, I can now go on and ask you information, not just about, hey, what's out there? Generally, you can ask it questions that are a little bit more specific that might be harder to find through a traditional search interface. And you can really kind of ask it questions about it.

Now, that is good and bad, but that is kind of what the product is. You're able to ask questions and it is still software. So it's only as good as the information that you give it.

So that was 2023. 2024 was the, I would say, both proliferation of these pre-trained models and the democratization of those models. So it's no longer just one company dominating the headlines. You had multiple different companies coming out with LLMs that you could interact with in a similar way. Some were better at certain tasks than others. I'm thinking of Claude from Anthropic is a great example.

A very similar product to what OpenAI has produced with ChatGPT, but also having a opportunity to do a little bit more, give you a different interface, give you kind of more options of, hey, I want this represented this way by kind of go ahead and do that for you. So seeing a bunch of those kinds of models come out and seeing the proliferation of these pre-trained models that are really now more available than ever. So I think that was the big 2024 kind of build there.

And Brett, I've got another question for you. Do you know what powers artificial intelligence? 

Brett: Well, the data, I would say the data.

Miles: Okay. Correct. And where's the data stored? 

Brett: On a data warehouse, of course. Right?

Miles: Right. And those data warehouses need to run on computers? 

Brett: Correct. 

Miles: Yeah. And those computers need a certain compute power? 

Brett: Yeah. 

Miles: And do you know what compute power is needed? There's a specific device.

Brett: A little chip.

Miles: Yeah. 

Brett: There's a company out there that's paying good stock right now for me. 

Miles: Yeah. So that to me is the biggest hardware innovation of 2024, is the advancements in chips. So you had CPU chips for a long time. That's kind of what your Intel core, the kind of things that help power the processing power of a computer. What it's designed to do and the software and hardware and information that runs on it.

Artificial intelligence needs a little bit more processing power. It uses it a little bit differently. So we use what are called GPU chips. And those pretty much made Nvidia very famous from a company that kind of operated in the background. It's quite frankly laughed at for years. They were the first player in the GPU game trying to really focus on artificial intelligence.

And now I think based on their earnings calls from the last three quarters, they are essentially laughing at everyone else for laughing at them back in the day. So I would say chip advancement and proliferation of those chips as well. 

It's not just Nvidia is the main player. You also have ARM, you have AMD, you have a bunch of other companies now, Intel, of course, really now playing catch up in some ways, but they're closing the gap. So what that's going to do is really kind of shift the market of, hey, how do we kind of look at hardware in the future? And what's really important really kind of comes down to how quickly can we develop these chips and how quickly can we double the power of those chips? That's kind of how chip manufacturing works.

Every six months, they're typically able to double the power and processing power of those chips. And so as that goes, we can also kind of build different tools for artificial intelligence and kind of have them go faster. I think that's another thing from 2024 that we saw is the processing speed and power of the application.

It is a lot faster than it used to be. They can do a lot more than they used to be able to do. There's some of what we're calling more reasoning models instead of just kind of a large language model where you're doing some small input in, small input out.

There's a little bit more logic associated with these models that gives them more opportunity to do more things. And that's also powered by the availability and the advancement of these chips in order to support those things as well. 

 

“2024 was both the proliferation of these pre-trained models
and the democratization of these models.”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Brett: On the hardware side, just out of curiosity too, do you see, kind of jumping into the future a little bit, but do you see, you know, you have Tesla's, you know, Musk's robot, the Tesla bot that's coming. Do you see it's going to start transforming from, I know it is a little bit of hardware because you're asking it through devices and things and applications, but do you see it moving more into kind of like a physical support type, like a robot? 

Miles: Yeah, yeah, that's a really good question, Brett. And I think that is going to be, seeing is believing, right? So artificial intelligence has been a part of our lives for almost 40 years, maybe longer, but it hasn't always been something that you and I could go to a website and experience and know I am interacting with artificial intelligence, right? And you know it when you see it, right? It's kind of, that's kind of the deal. So I think the hardware space is really fascinating.

You have a bunch of advancements, not just in like the software side, for what we deal with most of the time of just large language models, other pre-trained models, kind of the, I want to say like statistical analysis models that are out there now are really incredible. But that also dovetails to a hardware side where you have seen a huge advancement in robotics. 

I think Boston Dynamics is probably one of the more famous robotics companies in the state, at least state side that really have kind of shown, hey, this is what we can do with a robot. Isn't that incredible? It can run, it can jump, it can do all these kinds of tasks. You're seeing a ton of new models. I watched that, you're going to laugh right now.

I watched a thing about a new robot that is really kind of blending the line between reality and science fiction. It's a robot that can do household chores in your home for the price of a used Corolla. We're talking 17-18,000 bucks, you know.

Brett: Sign me up for that. 

Miles: Yeah, exactly. Just taking care of normal household tasks. It's a robot, lives in your house, got a charging station, kind of like, you know, I have a Roomba in my house, you know, to help me with my pet hair and stuff like that. Right, yeah. But this is really a much bigger change of, well, this is something that's different.

Those advancements in robotics dovetail also with the chip advancement and the kind of software advancements that we've seen in artificial intelligence over the last few years. So all these things are kind of coalescing together, and we're going to start seeing a lot more hardware products that have AI built in with advanced robotics in the very real and very near future. It's going to be an interesting world, you know, when we do this again next year.

 

“We are going to start seeing a lot more hardware products
that have AI built in with advanced robotics.”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Brett: Well, yeah. OK, so you mentioned a word, too. So I forgot one of the buzzwords. I think this was last year is the metaverse, right? Metaverse has been around forever, but Zuckerberg kind of came out, you know, changed Facebook to meta, all that stuff. What are your thoughts? Do you feel like kind of the VR, AVR, you know, that world is done? You have Apple invested in their headsets, you know, Meta's investing in theirs. Do you feel like that's kind of dying off, or do you think that we'll see kind of a resurge in that? 

Brett: Yeah, that's a great question. I think a lot of folks thought, oh, well, the key thing for us to do with metaverse and that sort of kind of utilizing augmented reality as well as a true virtual reality environment will be the consumer basis, right? Let's go to consumer with video games and sort of things like that. And there's a great use case for that. But Apple's big kind of splash into the VR space was really business to business.

How can I make it easier to do my work? And how can I say instead of, oh, well, you know, I don't know about you, Brett, but I find it really hard to do my job without multiple screens on my computer. So if I'm in a virtual reality environment, well, I can have four without the physical space. And I can have tasks going on over here.

I can have my email up. I can have, you know, my teams or, you know, if you're using Slack or what have you. And you can work on multiple different documents at the same time while wearing a headset.

And I think that was kind of the main idea behind Apple's. What we've seen in some of the products that we've built in the virtual reality space are on specialized training. And I'll kind of describe a little bit more about what that means, focused on one of our clients in a research hospital.

They are really focused on how do we improve the nursing experience for new nurses coming into our hospital? And not just on a kind of initial training side, but also a continuing education side. So how can we lift that up in a kind of lower risk environment? Not having to work with an actual patient, but still getting the same tactile skills that are needed in order to do the job effectively. Sometimes it's learning new equipment.

Sometimes it's kind of learning how to deal with somewhat difficult situations. But being able to train multiple people as quickly as possible is huge, especially for the health care space, which has been a ton of turnover, a ton of burnout. It's very difficult to kind of get started on with a new place.

What's the best way that we can utilize that kind of training and experience? And that's one thing that we've built over the last year with our partner hospital was being able to say, hey, let's build a training module just for a couple of things. And we've seen the early returns of the product that we've built are really great. 

You see folks like, well, I've never worked with this pump before. If I'm setting up an IV, how do I do that? And so going through and saying, OK, well, this is exactly the steps that we need to do. And these are also the ideas. The cool thing about the new headsets and everything is the hand tracking is great.

And so that gives you an idea when you're inserting an IV, Brett, I don't know if you do this for fun on the weekends. Be careful not to faint.

Brett: I faint with blood and IVs.

Miles: Yeah, exactly. I know you're a big IV guy. Being able to go through and say, OK, well, what's the proper angle to insert this IV? And having a tactile response and actually being able to physically do the action without having a real person there that you're working on, it gives people a little bit more ease and it puts them in a learning space where they're not stressed out, where they can have that.

So really the reason is everyone's at a much higher rate than you would elsewhere. So I think for VR and AR, the next step really is on the business to business side. Obviously, the video game industry does a great job doing what they do. We don't really play in that space and I don't really do that. So I'm like, all that sounds great. Don't really know.

My buddy who works at Electronic Arts would probably be very upset with me saying that.  But for our purposes, I think for the future, that training, support, kind of giving people an opportunity to experience something ahead of time so that when the real thing actually is happening, you have that kind of base knowledge up front to help support that.

I think it's not going in the way that everyone thought it was going to go, but life rarely does. But I think there's a huge market and a huge opportunity for it to continue down from there. 

 

“I think for VR and AR the next step really is on the
business to business side.”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Brett: Yeah, my interaction with it twice has been, one when my daughter was, it was kind of their way of showing her, this is your life of walking through your dorm and seeing your dorm room, which I think is genius because one of the universities we visited, you actually went to the live environment. And yeah, yeah. Poor, poor, kids to go into their room when it's messy.

Miles: Oh, yeah. I know that experience. Yeah.

Brett: And then the other was a corporate headquarters that was being built. But they actually got to walk through it before it was even like standing. 

Miles: Real estate is utilizing those kinds of 3D models to work through it. I know companies like Matterport and other kinds of companies as well are able to kind of now connect those two things together. So you can really see, hey, what's this place like without physically having to be there? Or what is this experience going to be like? So I think there's a ton of opportunity for it. And I think there are great use cases out there that I think will only continue to grow. 

Brett: Yeah. So speaking of growing, like so what now as we look into 2025 and beyond, what do you see coming? Like what for our listeners? What should they start researching? Just understanding what's coming in their direction. 

Miles: Ok, Brett. I'm going to again ask you another question. Are you familiar with what an artificial intelligence agent is? 

Brett: Yes, I am.

Miles: Ok, in your definition, what is an artificial intelligence agent? 

Brett: So it's essentially, in my definition is you're taking the data of your responses or even individual responses, email, so on and so forth. And you're creating kind of that agent that helps in those responses. 

One of my favorite examples is you kind of look at, you know, companies get a lot of leads every day in emails. And these agents can automatically respond, determine if it is a good lead. Should the sales team really follow up with that? So on and so forth. So that's kind of my definition of an agent. 

Now, the future agent in my mind is going to be where, like Apple, I'm a huge Apple fanboy. All of my data is on my phone. It can start creating a persona for me and help me respond, add calendar invites, you know, get rid of those kind of pesky calls that, you know, that tele-whatever. I forgot what they're called. I block them. So I don't, you know…

Miles: Telemarketers. 

Brett: Yeah. And I I think, too, there's a market. You're going to see a lot of the fraudulent stuff happening, like the fake IRS. I think I literally get an email every day from our CEO asking me to buy 500 gift cards and use my own personal card and he'll refund me, you know, and then you get it. So that's kind of the agent side, but I'm curious to know your take on it. 

Miles: Yeah. And that's a pretty good example of kind of how AI agents are going to kind of be a part of our lives here in the near future. I'll say in 2025, we're probably not going to get to the individual persona basis yet. And instead, that kind of brings us to like where we're at with artificial intelligence in general.

So we're right now in what a lot of folks are calling narrow intelligence, which is, I can give AI a very specific task and it will go and execute that task. So prompting chat, GPT or Claude or whatever. I need you to do this greater, giving a response. Same thing with statistical analysis. I need you to look for this, this, and this. And you're giving it the direction. You're giving it the opportunity.

It's going to spit an output back to you relatively quickly. The change that's going to happen is agents are going to start doing things for you. So let's say, Brett, you're on a call with one of your clients and you have four takeaways from that piece.

What the agent will then be able to do is summarize those notes from a transcription. It'll then send the email out or a recap after you can click approve or deny. And it will send the email out to all the people that are on there.

And then any tasks that you were supposed to do or follow up on will be created in your task management system. So for a software company, we operate with Jira. So if we said we're going to look at bug X, Y, Z or issue X, Y, Z, or feature epic, what have you. I call it the client. We describe what it is. We talk about what they want. It will actually go and create the ticket for you and file it. 

So what agents are designed to do and the goal behind agents is really to take a lot of the pointing and clicking of your work out of the equation. The whole goal behind them is really to say, well, if you need to continue to do this work or you need to continue to do X, Y, Z, those kind of things like the pointing and clicking, sending emails, all that kind of stuff. If it's pretty basic, you can have an agent do that for you. 

And that's going to be the big change in the way that we work over the next year is that those agents can become more and more popular and more and more proliferated, especially a lot of the major software companies are going to start seeing those pop up. 

 

“The change that is going to happen is agents are going to start doing things for you.”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Brett: Yeah, that's good. That's good. Well, kind of as we wind down this webinar of the year. So what are you most excited about with Buildable in 2025? 

Miles: Yeah, I'm so excited for 2025. Not only do we have a bunch of really great projects that we're working on with our clients and doing a lot of platform development. We are actually for the first time developing a product of our own. Buildable traditionally has been a services organization. We're dedicated to our clients and building products to their spec. 

And over the last, I don't know what, six months or so, we've really identified an opportunity that a lot of our clients are hoping for. But we feel like the delivery model of our traditional model of building something more bespoke, more specific to our clients needs, we're seeing a lot of similarity over it.

And so I think you and I got a wild hair one day and said, well, why don't we just build our own product that helps support this? That product, you'll be shocked to know, has artificial intelligence involved. So would you be willing to tell us a little bit more about kind of the idea behind the project and what it does and who it's for? 

Brett: Yeah, so we kind of, in some of our research conversations, we've had a lot of organizations that, you know, they get a lot of staff on, right? Whether it's the financial industry, health care, insurance, right? And you have that onboarding and right when that new person is sitting in their space on the phone or doing their task, they kind of come to this spot of like, I don't know how to do that. Or I don't know how to answer this question.

The traditional model is they search within like SharePoint or kind of look in their folders and so on and so forth, look for those procedures or those policies or guides of how to do it right. And then they just get this huge laundry list of folders or files essentially. And so what we wanted to do is really create a simplistic way that a person can quickly find the solution, get that answer based on the policies and procedures and documentation from those organizations, right? So we're really excited that we've launched that.

We're partnering with a credit union in Oregon to help us with just kind of testing, loading in their documents and things. And we've actually launched that last week, did our kickoff call, so we're pumped. And we're seeing already some good results.

It's really fun to test the model and, you know, ask for enhancements, those type of things. So we really feel like this is going to just, from my perspective, like the financial space, credit union space, this is really going to be transformational because you've got so many changes, things happening within the space that staff need that support to serve their clients or membership. And so that's kind of it in a nutshell, but there's more to come on that, but definitely excited about that as well.

 

“We wanted to create a simplistic way that a person
can quickly find the solution – get that answer.”

- Brett Wooden

 

Miles: Yeah, I mean, I'm more than excited for it. I'm ecstatic about this product. And a couple of things that really are really fun for us is, you know, in our business, we see a lot of, you know, our job is really to make very complex things easy for our clients.

On a pretty basic level, we want to make sure that we can take really complex workflows, UI, databases, and really make it so that it's easier for our clients to do their job. We want to build on what they already have and improve upon it. But with this product, what's really interesting is it's a similar concept to what we talked about in the beginning of the difference between, well, when Google came on the scene and, okay, well, that's a lot of people interacting with their SharePoints, their own data in the same way that people interact with Google.

It's relatively archaic now, which is kind of funny to say that, you know, Google was relatively archaic. But, you know, now we're seeing an opportunity of like, well, how can we leverage these new technologies in a way that makes it so much easier for people to do their job and take away from some of those things that might interrupt you from doing the work and give people the information that they need at their fingertips in a way that feels very natural. 

And I'm so excited for this product. I'm excited for you to take this thing on the road. And if any of you will be at GAC this year, please find Brett and bug him to show off the product. You know, he's a pretty easy guy to pick out of a crowd. So I want to make sure everyone kind of says, oh, yeah, hey, you got this product. Well, check it out. So, you know, we're good.

 

“Our job is really to make very complex
things easy for our clients.”

- Miles Oliveira

 

Brett: I think one of the things that blew my mind was we have an example of a disaster recovery plan and it's eighty-five pages long. And we loaded that bad boy in. And I mean, you can search. When was it last updated? What's our phone number to call if X? What's our failover process? And I mean, that thing is just like, bam, bam. 

And, you know, those are some things in those moments. And I've been in some in the credit union space where, you know, there's a hurricane coming and you've got literally twenty-four hours – the last thing you want to do is be digging through an eighty-five page document to find, you know, who you call to fail over, you know, all that stuff. And so it's pretty cool.

Miles: So the amount of time saved is incredible. 

Brett: Yeah. Well, to just wrap this up, you know, this is kind of our last webinar of the year. Next year, we've talked about possibly of moving this into a podcast or, you know, really just some ideas of how can we further this, getting different guests, maybe even doing some live ones where we're at some of the events. 

But we thank you for listening and, you know, always feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or you even want to be a guest on our show. We're more than happy to throw people on here. So, I mean, Miles is on here. 

But, well, thank you very much Miles for taking the time today. And thank you all for checking us out and listening to the recording. And we're just happy to do this. 

Miles: Thanks Brett. I appreciate it. 

Brett: Yeah. Thank you.

Miles: 2025 is gonna be a big year. 

Brett: Yeah. Happy New Year everybody.

Miles: Happy New Year.

Brett: Thanks Miles.

End Interview

See you next year!